Mom found a neat series of shorts from Martha Stewart's TV show, all on weddings, at our local library. They were lots of fun to watch! Our favorite sections were the sections devoted to flowers and cakes.
The cake episode opened with the camera panning the cake in the above picture, with soft music playing in the background and Martha's voice saying something like, "Why must a bride have only one towering wedding cake? Why not a whole tree?" Well, I was sold. I wasn't set on having a cake tree, but I thought it was pretty neat.
It helped when we found a picture of the same cake in one of Martha's wedding books (whence the above picture comes!). Mom and I started looking for plant stands like the one in the picture everywhere we could think of--from garden centers to Pier 1. Nothing seemed even remotely similar.
Then, Mom brought the videos over to my Uncle Bill, who agreed to make one for us! And it really came out exactly like. I was thrilled, and painted it with two coats of a similar pale green sometime in April. Now for the cakes. And the flowers.
My mom actually has made several beautiful wedding cakes, but a wedding cake is such a long and intense project (at least for us) that we realized it would be better if we commissioned someone else to do it. So, we met up with Robin, a lady from my grandmother's church, who has made cakes for years and can do just about anything. We showed her with a picture and settled on 10 10" rounds, all in different designs of her choosing. She let us taste some delightful Swiss meringue icing which she said would hold up well in the heat. It's made with loads of butter (no shortening). She also makes all her cakes from scratch. I asked for some chocolate cakes, with almond-flavored icing in the middle, and some white cakes with lemon curd. John wasn't around, but he loves both chocolate and lemon, so I figured we couldn't go wrong. :-)
Only the flowers remained, and we had some difficulty in figuring out how to arrange the flowers so that each bed was sufficiently stable to hold up a 10" cake. We asked around a lot, and finally found a friendly florist in Price Chopper who was willing to sell us the little plastic oasis trays they use there. Oasis was pretty hard to find, too, but we ended up buying a big block of it from a garden shop in downtown Saratoga.
On the day before the wedding, two of my aunts helped Mom with arranging the flowers themselves. Aunt Andrea brought hydrangeas from her garden, and they picked wild sweet peas from our property. They filled in with some kind of fern and draped the whole tree with vines. The result was perhaps a bit wilder than Martha Stewart's cake tree, but it was cool.
And that one bite of lemon-filled cake which John and I each got on our wedding day was delightful. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment